Pi

Those who know director Darren Aronofsky only for his sentimental Oscar flick The Wrestler will likely have their minds blown by his first film, a jittery, black-and-white thriller about a paranoid, migraine-suffering mathematician named Max (Sean Gullette). A lone geek on a quest to seek patterns in stock market fluctuations, Max soon becomes involved with a pack of Wall Street wolves and a Hasidic Jew cabal looking for divine messages encoded within large strings of numbers. It’s seriously tripped-out stuff (a pulsating brain on a subway platform) that telegraphed Aronofsky’s next film, the drugged-out Requiem for a Dream.